With the two most-wanted Nazi war crimes suspects finally in court, Efraim Zuroff tells Tony Paterson why his search for the culprits of the Holocaust will continue until the last one is dead.

For someone who enjoys the awesome reputation as the world's last Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff is disarmingly candid about how he started in the business of tracking down the perpetrators of genocide. Born in 1948, he had neither direct experience of the Holocaust nor any burning teenage ambition to bring mass murderers to justice. In fact he was more interested in basketball.

"As a youth growing up in New York, my sole ambition was to become the first orthodox Jew to play in the NBA – the National Basketball Association," he admits.

But all that changed in the early summer of 1967, when the man who now heads the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was 18 and Israel was on the brink of war.